Technology @lemmy.world ForgottenFlux @lemmy.world 2d ago

Microsoft Edge is trying to forcefully get your Chrome tabs again / Microsoft has a history of tricks to get you to use Edge, and the latest one targets Chrome users once again

www.theverge.com Microsoft Edge is trying to forcefully get your Chrome tabs again

Microsoft has a new trick to try and get Chrome users over to Edge.

Microsoft clearly isn’t bothered that it’s automatically starting up Edge on people’s PC and then trying to trick them into importing their Chrome data. That’s not too surprising though since Microsoft has been pulling tricks like this for more than four years now.

Microsoft’s behavior here makes many people distrust Edge, Windows 11, and even the company’s AI efforts.

62 comments

lol. Imagine still using chrome.
- Only if I need to get old emails off that Gmail shit.
Just doing the lords work and spreading the news of W11 IoT Enterprise LTSC. It only has Defender and Edge; no Xbox, App Store, Copilot, nor Recall, or any other bloat. Perfect for gaming. Don't waste your time looking for it on sites like massgravedotdev.
- And if you have lots of windows machines at home, running enterprise for whatever reason, dont look up vlmcsd and definitely dont look up the kms srv records to put on your home domain
- Except it's not perfect for gaming. If you happen to have titles purchased through the Xbox/MS storefronts, you won't be able to play them. The version of windows you speak of lacks three critical system packages that allow UWP based games to work. Xbox Identity Provider, TCUI, and speech to text (some games rely on that for accessibility). If you file any bug report or ask for support from the development, they'll discard your ticket when they look at logs (unsupported OS). You also gimp yourself on feature sets.
  
  You can install all the M$ Store and Xbox apps. Afterwards the XBox app will tell you all the other apps missing and a 1 click button to install each. It's just a nice clean blank slate to start with. It doesn't even have .net or vcredist installed.
  
  What missing feature sets?
  
  Edit: I myself install 2 needed dependencies to get Winget running after a fresh install. One has to do with UWP.
Jokes on them, I don't use chrome
- Jokes on them, I don’t use Windows
  
  Jokes on them I am still on NT4
  
  jokes on them, i don't own a computer
  
  Jokes on them, Edge doesn't respect my GTK theme.
  
  It's not my main but I do have edge installed on Linux. I keep it around That's both a vanilla Chrome install and the GPT-4 interface.
  
  I keep most of my AI local but once in a while I need something that's outside of the llama realm
Windows in general is just fucking hostile to use. Everything they do now just seems like they are spitting in your face and laughing at you.
- Fr, i remember windows taking longer to setup,Some Linux Distros only rlly had issues with secureboot(I turn on secure boot so windows doesn't freak out) and everything was ready.
Linux Mint isn't perfect, but at least it's not constantly trying to steal my shit or force something on me that I don't want.
- I honestly wish I liked mint because there’s such a robust community for it, but I really can’t stand it. My first Linux experience a decade back or so was Ubuntu and it felt -right- like android. I liked it very much because it did all the things I needed, and it felt good to use, like something I was familiar with (android!). The power file management was an absolute bonus and I just love it so much. But it’s based on iOS allegedly? I fucking hate iOS on mobile but maybe it’s the macOS? Idk. It’s not at all like iPhone iOS at least.
  
  And I haven’t found the same experience on any other distro despite trying several, so here’s me back to Ubuntu every time.. because it feels good to use.
  
  And “Ubuntu bad because reasons” and I get that for not me, but I don’t have the energy to figure out how to make Debian do what Ubuntu just already does. And the really niche distros I’ve tried idk how to make work for my needs, as noob.
  
  At least it isn’t windows..
  
  This is a perfectly valid reason to like Ubuntu, and it mirrors my own reason for preferring Mint: familiarity with an OS UI. In my case, Mint Cinnamon is the closest I could find to the Win98 user interface. Back in the old days I also had Ubuntu, but then they switched to the Unity UI and I changed to Lubuntu. That went to the pits a few years ago, so I moved on to Mint. Just like you, I also have a preference for the UI, and I suspect that very many people choose a distro based on their UI preferences. That's the beauty of Linux: plenty of options for everyone.
  
  I'm not trying to bash here, but sometimes I wonder what people actually do with their OSs.
  
  I fire up software that I use, it would be quite consistent across any compatible OS, and we're ahead of the days when multi screens didn't work etc.
  
  I'm on mint but any easy to install linux or even windows would give me the same workflow (after dealing with their bullshit ofc) except the terminal, and some other crap effectively. But on Linux? Smooth as a mirror, or what am I missing?
  
  I used Ubuntu until bad because reasons. Tried multiple distros but no other DE felt quite as good until I tried pop_OS!. It is supposed to be some gaming oriented OS based on Ubuntu but I love it because of the great window management they have.
- Games is still what keeps me on the absolute shit show that is Windows. Proton has come a long way in solving this problem but there are still enough issues especially with new games that I have to have a Windows partition.
  
  I ripped the bandaid off last month, there's definitely fiddling and hdr is still in early days (works in gamescope, but found that can have issues with my nvidia card), I've been playing veilguard on proton ge for the last week, and proton experimental supports dlss frame gen now which is huge for me.
  
  It's definitely in the good enough state imo, and it seems to rapidly be getting better.
  
  I'm mentally preparing for the switch. Would you mind naming some of the games keeping you on Windows?
Microshit and goo gle? Let them fight! Two of the most harmful companies...
- Who do you think gets hurt if these guys fight?
  
  Them, and its beneficial to the IT world
MS isn’t bothered because the vast majority of people don’t give a shit. “Many” is doing a lot of lifting in that paragraph. Its probably more accurate to say “…a few people distrust Edge…”
- That's a shame since literally everyone should distrust Edge, given Microsoft's history with browsers (and everything else). I don't think anyone matches Microsoft's caviler attitude of "We know there are hundreds of gaping security holes that allow attackers to take full admin control of your computer, but we're just going to mark those bugs as will-not-fix and blame the users when something goes wrong."
Funny because Microsoft also recently dropped support for Firefox for Xbox GamePass Cloud Gaming on Android. I say "dropped support" but really they stopped letting you use the purpose built app and are now forcing you to use browser but the only "supported" browsers are Chrome and Edge. Firefox works, but they forcefully disconnected me after 5 minutes so it's not a matter of compatibility. They just want that traffic going through Edge ideally but they do still support Chrome, for now.
- Try a user agent switcher, might be enough to make them fuck off and let you play.
Moved to MacOS years ago, where the default browser is actually good!
- As someone that often ends up doing a lot of web development, Safari is the rough modern equivalent of Internet Explorer.
  
  How so?
  
  I use Firefox most of the time, but if I really need to stretch the battery life I’ll use Safari. It seems significantly faster and more power efficient than anything else I’ve used. If it had better plugin support, it’d be my daily driver. Can’t say I’ve ever had issues with it rendering a page.
  
  I’m a web developer but I absolutely love Safari. I seriously don’t understand the hate. From an end-user perspective it’s sooo much less clunky too.
- Mac ain't that bad, I just wish apple didn't make repairs hard and stuff.
  Edit:Ios and Ipados and Tvos kinda sucks bcs they are very locked down,For some reason mac (Which is unix-like like linux) is not locked down, its only locked down to the hardware thats works with it.
  
  For me, having it locked down is the selling point. I used to be big into jailbreaking but for 90% of users it’s better this way.
  
  For development work though obviously having it not so locked down is kind of necessary. Luckily I don’t write apps from iOS or tvOS so it’s a nonissue for me.
  
  I agree with you there, but after being Android and Windows for years, being in the Apple ecosystem feels like a breath of fresh air
Big yawn

Microsoft is so... Old people stuff
- The only Windows people I know are the Java developers at my workplace and it shows. Containerization and Linux/UNIX conventions are definitely not followed and everything’s a clusterfuck with those guys.
but is it really worse?
- yeah, way more blotted that any other chromium fork I've seen

62 comments